Writing, drawing with eyes

PARIS – It is now possible to draw and write using just eye movements, claimed France's National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).

French CNRS researcher Jean Lorenceau said that subjects suffering from limb paralysis can use their eyes to personalize their writing and express themselves. They can write numbers, letters, figures, their signatures and to draw through a technique based on an oculometer and a computer screen. An oculometer enables eye movements to be recorded by analyzing images of the human eye captured by a camera to calculate the direction in which the subject is looking.

Source: CNRS

The left hand side of this figure shows the position (solid line) and the speed (dotted line) of horizontal (red) and vertical (green) eye movements. On the right: the word “eye” corresponds to these traces.Source: CNRS

Figures written with the deviceSource: CNRS

To start with, Lorenceau said he used a visual illusion called reverse-phi. The illusion occurs when several hundred disks whose luminance varies over time at a frequency of around 10-15 Hertz are displayed on the screen. When the subject's eyes move over this flickering background, the subject has the clear impression that the disks move with the displacement of the eyes. Since the human eye can with precision moving objects, the illusory movement of the disks induced by the movement of the eyes gives them a moving support, allowing them to realize regular and non-jerky trajectories, researcher claimed.

An oculometer then records the movements of the user's eye and a software tool enables these movements to be visualized on a screen.

Click on image to view videoSource: CNRS

Lorenceau indicated that only two to four training sessions lasting around 30 minutes are needed to be able to manage eye movements and draw letters. Then, well-trained users can write with their eyes at more or less the same speed as with their hand.

Moving forward, Lorenceau said he expects to propose the system to persons suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. It could also be used to train pilots, surgeons, sportsmen, artists and other persons whose activities require precise oculomotor control, he concluded.

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Why are the light circles needed? just for training the users?
This is very interesting. I think this can become an app for mobile phones and become a new way of controlling or a new form of HMI.
At least if not controlling, if the computing device is aware of where the user's eye is looking at, perhaps the interaction can further be speed up and made more agile. This is something that can become widespread.

Eye-gazing technology has been around for some time in various labs but failed to break into the mainstream. I believe niche applications are where we will see this technology deployed. It's simply not practical for wider use.

This is especially elegant because it enables direct communication to another person. How does the "writer" indicate end of word breaks? Is it a rapid blink of the eye or some darting glance away? I suppose a similar approach could be used on a virtual keyboard to look at and trigger the individual keys.